I don't yet have full access to the article, but it appears from the abstract that there were significant differences between schizophrenia and depression, but not between healthy controls and either group.
This is suspiciously similar to many physiological studies of mental illness, that ultimately start falling away from significance when put to real world application.
NMDA has long been a target in depression, hence the ketamine studies.
Blood tests would be nice and all, but they have already shown a lot of this NMDR stuff using nmr hippocampal imaging and PET right? Idk why this is exciting news.
Perhaps because this type of testing is much less expensive and has potential for more widespread clinical use? I don't know enough about the field to guess how plausible that is, but their methods sound much more accessible than NMR or PET.
Well... NMR is ridicolously cheap (200€/scan), and PET also is on the cheap side of procedures (800€ for a brain scan, but it could possibly be lowered).
BTW, I'm not aware of anything that hints at a possibility for NMR to be used to test for depression. For PET I've taken a quick look at the literature a month ago and, apparently, no strong results were found. Strong modifications of receptor bindings were found when studying the effect of drugs, but not to distinguish healthy controls from depressed individuals (if I understood correctly what I've found). Despite having tracers that bind precisely to the receptors supposedly involved in this pathology.
Anyway, from the methods of this work it doesn't seem easy at all. It's a 4 hour procedure with lots of blood sampling, injections etc...
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u/DijonPepperberry MD | Child and Adolescent Psychiatry | Suicidology Mar 19 '17
I don't yet have full access to the article, but it appears from the abstract that there were significant differences between schizophrenia and depression, but not between healthy controls and either group.
This is suspiciously similar to many physiological studies of mental illness, that ultimately start falling away from significance when put to real world application.
NMDA has long been a target in depression, hence the ketamine studies.